Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "" video.

  1. AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE: I find this sort of reporting so egregious I want to scream at every journalist on the planet. I did my degree in the late 80s and one Friday we had a NASA engineer who'd just done a study on terraforming Mars. We were pretty excited and then he started with "Its impossible and here's why." He then went on to explain the basics of geoengineering. He basically divided it into 2 concepts that I now call Planetary Mechanics and Planetary Dynamics. Planetary Dynamics is the harder subject, because its about things like water, oxygen, carbon dioxide and thermal cycles. We know all these things exist but we have almost zero understanding of the interactions between all these cycles and as such have almost zero understanding of how to engineer these cycles or adjust them to get different outcomes. Its what makes some of these proposals so dangerous. Planetary Mechanics is the easier subject as its just calculating how much stuff needs to be done. It starts with basic geometry and calculating volumes and then how much stuff is needed to fill those volumes. Then there's some basic thermodynamics to work out what it would take to heat or cool that much stuff. Where this gets weird for most people is the size of the numbers involved, but if you can get it that part then you realise just how much trouble humanity is in. The layer of air we (8.1billion people) live in is basically 2 kilometers thick. Yes I know its roughly 100km thick in total but the part 98% of us live in is just the first 2km above the Earths surface and that is roughly 1 billion cubic kilometres of air weighing around 1.3 quadrillion metric tons. We tend not to think too much that air has weight, but the part we live in has a lot of weights. Plus there is now around 2.5trillion tons of excess CO2 in that layer and by the mid 2030s it will be closer to 3.5trillion tons. So the engineering problem is: How do you process 1 billion cubic kilometers of air weighing 1.3 quadrillion tons and extract the 3.5trillion tons of CO2? AND then where do you bury that much CO2? Once you realise the scope of what needs to be done almost every engineering (mechanical, electrical, chemical) means becomes irrelevant because the amount of materials we'd need to build that much hardware and then power it makes the entire concept irrelevant. There's a BBC video showing a direct carbon capture system that uses geothermal energy. At their current costs estimates of ($1,000/ton) it would cost $3.5quadrillion dollars. At their scaled up cost of $300/ton it would only cost $1quadrillion. And that doesn't include answering the question where we'd get all the steel, nickel and other materials to build all the units needed. EVERY concept I have seen so far comes up against the same problem. How do you process that much air and then what do you do with that much C02. THERE IS AN ANSWER.
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  2.  @coastofkonkan  Thanks, but the real credit goes to a guy who came to our college and explained this stuff in 1987.
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  3.  @leonstenutz6003  thanks
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  4.  @pn2543  Where do you get the $10b/yr figure from. I don't mind people who want to ask or estimate so long as the estimation is based on something but just pulling numbers out of thin air DOES NOT HELP. I started my trees estimate with the need to remove 3.5 Trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere because that's what we need to consider removing. It might even be over 4 trillion by the 2050s. If 8 billion people plant 1,000 trees each and 1 in 4 survives to adulthood. That's 2 Trillion trees absorbing around 1.5 tons each which is 3 Trillion tons. So we either need to have a greater survival rate of planted trees or plant more trees. To put some perspective on that. At $2-5 per tree its something like $16-40trillion in basic costs. The BBC aired a story a while back about a geothermal powered direct CCS system that costs $1,000/ton. At that price it'd cost 3.5 QUADRILLION. They claimed they could get it down to $300/t at scale. That's still just over $1 QUADRILLION ($1,000 trillion) Your $10billion/yr over 1 century is $1 trillion. That's the scale of the problem we have. If you think doing something as complex as sun shields at Lagrange point 1 (L1) will cost less than trees then you either have a technology that's insanely cheap or have massively underestimated the task. The ISS is ~200tons and cost ~$200billion to build in LEO. Ho w big do you think your sun shield will be or what it would cost to put at L1? The idea is valid but the cost estimate needs work.
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